He wrote about death. He wrote about many things, but death, and the return from death, and the voices and remembrances of the dead pervade Poe’s work—like dramatist John Webster in Eliot’s poem, Poe “was much obsessed with death. He saw the skull beneath the skin.” Unlike Webster, though, Poe also saw the skull, and could not forget the skin that had once covered it.

(“The death of a beautiful woman,” Poe wrote in an essay on the writing of “The Raven,” “is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”)

People today still examine Poe’s life, trying to use his life to illuminate his work: his actor parents—his father vanished, his mother dead by the time he was three; his strained relationship with John Allan, his foster father; Poe’s child bride and her tuberculosis; his troubles with the bottle; his mysterious and early death (he was forty). The life, short, tangled, strange, becomes a frame for the work, giving it context, and supplying both unanswerable mysteries and a shape in which the stories and the poems wait for each new generation of readers to discover them.

And discover them we do.

The best of Poe doesn’t date. “The Cask of Amontillado” is as perfect a tale of vengeance as ever was crafted. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a clear-eyed look through the eyes of madness. “The Masque of the Red Death” seems more relevant with every year that passes. The stories still delight. I suspect they always will.

Poe isn’t for everyone. He’s too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud.

Read the poems aloud. Read the stories aloud. Feel the way the words work in your mouth, the way the syllables bounce and roll and drive and repeat, or almost repeat. Poe’s poems would be beautiful if you spoke no English (indeed, a poem like “Ulalume” remains opaque even if you do understand English—it implies a host of meanings, but does not provide any solutions). Lines which, when read on paper, seem overwrought or needlessly repetitive or even mawkish, when spoken aloud reshape and reconfigure.

(You may feel peculiar, or embarrassed, reading aloud; if you would rather read aloud in solitude I suggest you find a secret place; or if you would like an audience, find someone who likes to be read to, and read to him or to her.)

For a long time, one of my favorite books-as-an-object has been a copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination, illustrated by the Irish stained-glass artist Harry Clarke, with a passion and a madness and an intense sense of shadows and of the wrongnesses of angle and form that seem perfectly suited to Poe’s nightmarish tales.

But then, Poe’s stories will always cry out to be illustrated. They contain central and primary images, blasts of color, and maddening visual shapes (imagine: a black raven on the pale bust of Pallas Athena; the rooms of all colors but one in Prospero’s doomed palace; the bottles and the bones in Montresor’s catacombs; a single black cat in a wall, on the head of a dead woman; a heart beating beneath the floorboards—a tell-tale heart . . .). Pictures come unbidden as you read the tales; you craft them in your head.